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Beauty
LUCY HARTLEY

W HAT does it mean to be interested in beauty? The last decade or

two have seen renewed attention to beauty both within our field,
where economic and liberal discourses as well as discourses of science
and the body have been brought to bear on established aesthetic tradi-
tions, and in the humanities at large, where the aesthetic has to some
extent been recuperated from charges of cultural elitism and social irrel-
evance. I shall not attempt to count the ways beauty has been defined in
nineteenth-century literature and culture nor to chart its manifold forms
and values across the century, nor even to connect it, strategically or oth-
erwise, to the present. Rather, I shall attempt to outline a political inter-
pretation of beauty by reflecting not just on what it meant but also for
whom. In so doing, I place the stress on interest, that is, on the complex-
ities of being interested in beauty amidst the social transformations of
nineteenth-century Britain.
Let me turn to Raymond Williams by way of registering the complex-
ities of interest and, at the same time, registering appreciation for his
work. Williams is, characteristically, alert to the shifting historical senses
of interest: it is, he notes, “a significant example of a word with special-
ized legal and economic senses which, within a particular social and
economic history, has been extended to a very general meaning,” and,
he continues, “the now predominant sense of general curiosity or atten-
tion, or having the power to attract curiosity and attention, is not clear
before C19.”1 Here are the grounds of possibility for being interested
in beauty. Put differently, beauty might be understood in a limited
sense as a marker of taste and privilege (as, for instance, in the essays
of Walter Pater) and in an expansive sense as a means of imagining
the lives of individual subjects and their roles and responsibilities in
society (as, for example, in the writings of John Ruskin).
I do not want to overdraw the opposition between Ruskin and Pater
but instead gesture to the terms of debate. To this end, I want to make
three claims about the debate over beauty in nineteenth-century
Britain. First, that it arose from and spoke to a particular set of conditions
including (but not limited to) state intervention into matters of art, the
ascendency of the middle classes and the alienation of the working
classes, and the extension of the franchise. Second, that it pivoted on
the distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding actions as

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 BEAUTY 585

critics, artists, and arts administrators directed individuals and groups to

identify a position amongst conflicting understandings of interest in
order to participate in the collective life of society and also recognize
their own aesthetic advantage or detriment. Third, that it revealed con-
flicts between established political notions of nobility and class hierarchy
and emerging democratic ideals of liberty, individuality, and equality.2
One way of thinking about the content and consequences of these claims
is to borrow a statement from Dean Mathiowetz, a political theorist who
contends that “arguments from interest . . . are claims about ‘who’ some-
body is, and provocations to act in such a way that this ‘who’ is realized,”
and, further, that “identity is not a backdrop to interest; rather, an appeal
to the interest of an agent is an ascription to that agent of an identity
against a field of possibilities.”3
To parse this statement, let me now offer an example of how beauty
might serve as the ground for democracy as well as an instrument of
social justice. It is well known that William Morris championed “the
Democracy of Art” in his lectures and socialist writings, decrying the
destruction of society by the forces of industrial capitalism and advocat-
ing for its reconstruction by reinvesting value in the production of beau-
tiful objects.4 The terms by which Morris explains this cause bear more
than a passing resemblance to Alexis de Tocqueville’s opinions about
the cultivation of the arts in Democracy in America.5 Morris was not
impressed by received standards of art on the evidence of his admittedly
rare visits to the Royal Academy, however. More appealing to his political
and aesthetic sensibilities were the possibilities presented by free exhibi-
tions in working-class districts of, say, Manchester and London. Take the
Whitechapel Fine Art Loan Exhibition: its purpose, Morris explained at
the Easter opening in 1884, was to show “beauty, imagination, [and]
fancy” to “a set of people much in need of such instruction,” and to
prove “a serious man” can dedicate his life to “expressing these qualities
for the benefit of his fellows.”6 Or take the art exhibition at New Islington
Hall in Ancoats, Manchester where, in the same year, Morris called on
workingmen to claim their right to beauty: “the qualities of beauty and
interest which have made these works the wonder of the world should
be present in some way or another in your own daily work and have
their influence on your home life, making it orderly, beautiful, in a
word human.”7
Morris was not alone in wanting a less impoverished and more toler-
ant and inclusive understanding of beauty; at the same time, his provoca-
tions to action were not devoid of exclusions since his appeal was made

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expressly and consistently to workingmen. In fact, the Whitechapel Fine

Art Loan Exhibition (sometimes called the St. Jude’s Picture Exhibition)
appealed to a broader constituency of women, children, and men than
Morris admitted. Set up on the initiative of Samuel and Henrietta
Barnett and inspired by their commitment to Ruskin’s teachings on art
and society, the Exhibitions, which ran from 1881 to 1897, represent a prac-
tical endeavor to democratize beauty.8 “What do the people want with fine
art? . . . Show them an oleograph of ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ or a colored
illustration of ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den,’ and they will like it just as much as
Mr. Millais’s ‘Chill October’ or Mr. Watts’s ‘Love and Death.’” Such were
some of the opinions Henrietta Barnett recorded about the very idea of
“having an art exhibition in Whitechapel.”9 And yet, the Barnetts persisted
in their belief that objects of beauty could offer a moral and cultural coun-
terweight to the problem of poverty. The intersection of contemporary art
with social impoverishment at St. Jude’s reveals tensions between tradition
and progress, between class hierarchy and property, between sacred and
secular, and between aesthetic and economic conditions. These tensions
are, I propose, fundamental to understanding beauty in nineteenth-
century Britain.

NOTES
1. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 171, 172. For a related
account of interest, see Albert O. Hirschman, “The Concept of
Interest: From Euphemism to Tautology,” in Rival Views of Market
Society (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), 35–55.
2. For detailed explanation of these claims, see my book: Democratising
Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1–17.
3. Dean Mathiowetz, Appeals to Interest: Language, Contestation, and the
Shaping of Political Agency (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2011), 9–10.
4. See, in particular, William Morris, “Art under Plutocracy,” in The
Collected Works of William Morris, with Introductions by His Daughter May
Morris. Volume XXIII: Signs of Change. Lectures on Socialism (London:
Longmans, Green & Co., 1915), 164–91.
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Of the Spirit in which the Americans Cultivate
the Arts,” in Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, new ed., 2 vols.
(London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1889), 2: 42–49.

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 B E AU T Y, B OY 587

6. May Morris, William Morris. Artist Writer Socialist. Volume the Second
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), 165.
7. Morris, William Morris, 413.
8. On the Exhibitions, see Seth Koven, “The Whitechapel Picture
Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing,” in Museum Culture: Histories,
Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 22–48; and
Diana Maltz, “In ample halls adorned with mysterious things aesthetic:
Toynbee Hall as Aesthetic Haven,” in British Aestheticism and the Urban
Working Classes, 1870–1900. Beauty for the People (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), 67–97.
9. Henrietta Barnett, “Pictures for the People,” in Practicable Socialism:
Essays on Social Reform, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1894), 175.

Boy
MATTHEW KAISER

Though she called me ‘boy’ so often, and with a carelessness that was far
from complimentary, she was of about my own age.
—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations1

B EYE; boye; boie; boi. It is unclear why the voiced bilabial stop known
as the “b” sound, when harnessed to the business end of the dip-
thong “oi,” should appeal to the medieval ear as a means of communicat-
ing diminutive or low status in male persons. What is clear, however, is
that, by the early thirteenth century, the slang term “boye,” introduced
to England by Dutch sailors and Frisian merchants, and watered liberally
by tavern badinage, had taken root in English. By the time Edward I
expelled the Jews in 1290 and conquered Wales, the monosyllable had
experienced a lexical growth spurt, acquiring three related but distinct
meanings: male child; knave; and male servant or slave. “Boy” as
“knave” (the dubious, illegitimate or base man) barely survived the four-
teenth century, petering out in the fifteenth, but “boy” as “male child”
(the proto-man, the not-yet man, the unformed or half-grown man)

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